Monday, February 07, 2005

PBS's Lesbo Bunnygate is just another example of this administration trying to force it's religion down the throats of the rest of America. The completely harmless episode focused on a kid being raised by lesbian mothers. At no point in the episode is their sexual orientation discussed.

It's not like the show took an informative segment on maple sugar making and turned it into a lesbian infomercial. The whole point of Postcards is to introduce kids to cultural diversity. This Boston Globe editorial remarks on how unoffensive the episode actually is. But it's unoffensiveness isn't the point is it? From the point of Christian extremists, PBS had the unmitigated gall to portray lesbians at all. From the BG editorial:

Against the pastoral glories of Vermont, with maple trees dripping and cows in need of milking, the lesbian families are almost Waltonesque in their rural charm. For those who'd rather pathologize and exclude same-sex couples and their children, that normalcy must spark a lot of anguish. To them, showing and telling about lesbian families is the same as promoting... Buster's parents are divorced, although I don't think the show is promoting marital breakup.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's going to happen in most markets. Retaliations against PBS by the Department of Education have begun. The executive producer of the Postcards from Buster show has been disinvited from a children's television conference cosponsored by the Department of Education and PBS. I'm sure it was just a coincidence that Margaret Spellings, the same public "servant" that objected to the show in the first place, now runs the Department of Education. If such retaliation is expected from the government, it could have a chilling effect throughout all of media.

The GLADD Executive Director commented that Spellings is trying to enforce an official policy of invisibility on gay and lesbian families. And that's exactly what they're trying to do.